"You equate your understanding of your particular sectarian form of Catholic Christianity and its institutional expression with God's own truth primarily to justify your petty armchair popery…." Yep, that's what it's all about.

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Christians against ID, Part 2

This topic came to my mind recently because I’m taking an Astronomy course at my local community college. In this course I learned that shortly after the Big Bang (that is, relatively shortly), there were only three elements: Hydrogen, helium and a small amount of lithium. These elements eventually started condensing and forming into galaxies and stars. It was through the life cycles of stars that the heavier elements developed, such as the ones we and our planet are made of. Our sun is not a first-generation star but was formed from the materials left over from prior generations of stars.

This got me thinking: The very matter that we and our planet are made of is a product of evolution of a sort, the evolution of matter from lighter elements to heavier ones through natural processes over billions of years. ID itself doesn’t dispute this.

But isn’t the evolution of the matter we’re made of, part of the process of making us?

It struck me that if God started the process that way, why wouldn’t he finish it that way? I think he would have used one continuous process, rather than starting with one process and finishing with another. I definitely think he could create us with one continuous process using natural means. Why not? Would it be too hard for him to figure out how to set up the universe, to fine-tune it, so to speak, in just such a way that you and I would eventually result? Too hard for an omnipotent God of infinite intelligence, who constantly holds every atom in existence simultaneously?

“For example, a change in the strength of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10^100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. The cosmological constant which drives the inflation of the universe and is responsible for the recently discovered acceleration of the universe’s expansion is inexplicably fine-tuned to around one part in 10^120. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the Big Bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10^10(123). Penrose comments, ‘I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10^10(123).’ And it’s not just each constant or quantity that must be exquisitely finely-tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely-tuned. So improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”

So the universe is fine-tuned for life. Again ID proponents don’t deny this. In fact, they love it since it points to a Designer. So … why not take the fine-tuning argument to its logical conclusion? Could not the cosmos be so fine-tuned that, not only is life possible, but that it positively must have arisen? And in the forms God intended?